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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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J. Michael Martinez was born and raised in Greeley, CO. He is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado and received an M.F.A. from George Mason University.

His poems have appeared in New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, The Colorado Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others, and the anthology Junta: Avant-Garde Latino/a Writing. He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize and is co-editor and co-founder of Breach Press.

In 2009, Martinez's collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, and will be published by Louisiana State University Press.

About his work, Herrera wrote: "Heredities breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings."

Martinez is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Meister Eckhart's Sermon on Flowers and the Philosopher's Reply

J. Michael Martinez

A hollowed singularity exists in flowers
like pathos in a dandelion:
an eddy of fate, degreeless,
silvering through memory.
A scabbed consonant departing
the sentence: locust petal, bromeliad,
a surfacing shame, lightless, beyond hearing.
Solitary, the clock circumvents sound
and a horse importunes
a wasp bowing before significance.
●
It is in fact doubtless a wasp bows before significance
degreeless in a dandelion.
It also stands to reason that, in a clock, locusts circumvent memory
in order to depart through fate.
And anyone can see that singularity exists lightless
like an eddy of pathos surfacing beyond hearing.
In conclusion, however solitary
(and you know this as well as I),
a consonant will always
depart the sentence before shamed by a horse.